Schumann Bicentennial Celebration

On the Performance of Mozart's “Ave Verum Corpus”

by
Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Leesburg, Virginia
June 20, 2010

Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

Lyndon LaRouche made the following remarks at the celebration of Robert Schumann's 200th birthday, which was
held at a local Leesburg church. His remarks followed the
performance of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus by the LaRouche Youth
Movement Chorus. Afterward, the LYM Chorus again performed the
motet.

This particular motet has long had a
particular significance for me. It goes back decades in this
matter, and I've always hoped to get it right. Because, what
you're seeing here is something which is not in the score, but
it's the intention which underlies the score itself, in this
case, Mozart. Because it's not simply a repetition at the
closing part of the chorus, here. It's a sense of true
immortality.

Now, immortality is not simply something which is preached
on at Sunday services.

Of late, we've had some progress in the scientific
work, which assures me that I have a number of associates who
understand clearly what I'm saying. And often, I've held back in
life, when I've had a discovery of knowledge, I've held back in a
public presentation of it, because, no one would really
understand it. And I've found that among my Basement crew, in
particular, that finally, we've reached the point, there is an
understanding, of the nature of real human life, which lies not
in the flesh as such, but lies in something which human beings
can express.

We think of ourselves as being in the flesh. We think of
ourselves as being seen, or heard, or smelled, for our presence.
But that is not really what we are as human beings. Animals do
that. Human beings are not animals. They're something else. We
think in terms of sense-organs, and unfortunately, in society
generally, people think only in terms of sense-organs as defining
them, as defining them in the eyes of others, and defining them
in the eyes of themselves, or the smell of themselves.

They don't realize that our senses do not show us reality.
The senses show us the shadows cast by reality, the reality of
the human mind. And all of our great principles, physical
principles, for example, come from the practice of this
understanding: That the truth lies not in the senses, or that
which pertains to the senses as such. The senses give you the
shadows of reality. Your job is to know how to interpret those
shadows, to think of, and address specifically, the reality,
which the shadows merely cast.

And thus, when we look at ourselves and our
sense-experience, we should stand back from sense-experience, and
look at sense-experience as an object to be looked at, because,
for example, in any discovery, as in Kepler's discovery of
gravitation, the discovery was based on using the contrast of two
specific human senses, of sight and music, sight and hearing:
It's the contrast between the two that enabled Kepler to make the
discovery of gravitation. And that applies to everything.

We say then, we are, in a sense, see ourselves as actors
upon a stage: But we want to see, say, actors who portray people
from past history, as in a great Classical drama. So, we don't
want to see them as standing onstage, now. We want to see the
shadows of them, now, as cast by a hundred, or a thousand, or so,
years ago. And we think then, if we, too, are onstage, as
Shakespeare said once, "All the world's a stage," we want to see
ourselves as we really are. We want to see ourselves, in a
sense, as immortal, see us as we see a great performance of a
drama. We see someone a thousand years past, or hundreds of
years past: We see them. We see what they were, as we see the
persons portrayed onstage.

And, in this music, in particular, that's exactly what's
happening: It's a performance onstage, and these singers here,
are singing--there's no question about that [laughter]. It's a
question of sense-perception, you can hear them, you can't see
them; if you turn the lights out, you can still hear them.
[laughter] But, what they're representing, is, they're
representing a situation, a historical situation, pertaining to
the death of Christ. And through this medium, of this particular
piece of genius by Wolfgang Mozart, you're able to capture a
glimpse of that moment, and how the people who observed, and
mourned, the passing of Jesus, how they--how we reach them.
How you capture the moment in which they lived, captured that
moment in which they lived.

And you have to learn, therefore, when you have a great
composer like Mozart, who was a genius, much underestimated,
actually--much-appreciated, but much-underestimated--to
appreciate his insight, the power of insight, to convey with this
particular motet. There are many versions of the motet, apart
from Mozart before them. They're all rather trivial. They
really don't convey the message. Mozart, in the artful way he
composed this particular motet, when properly sung, conveys a
sense of immortality. Because it captures a moment in real
history, the moment at the time of the death of Christ. And
therefore, when it's properly sung, under the proper
circumstances, with the proper presciences in the audience, they
actually live through--the audience, with the chorus, lives
through, that moment in past actual moment of history. And it's
a way of communicating a sense of the intrinsic immortality of
the person, not in the flesh, but in the consequence of their
lives for all mankind.

And this has a reciprocal feature, that it compels you,
perhaps, if you're sensitive, to find your immortality, as you
find immortality expressed on that occasion, after the death of
Christ, over 2,000 years ago. You have a sense of immortality.
And that's what happens in all great art, all great Classical
art, and all great Classical music, in particular, is that thing
that puts you at a distance from the present time, and gives you
a relationship, an experienced relationship, which is more
durable, which can take you back thousands of years, in terms of
human art, that we know of, for example, from Homer and so forth,
you get this sense of thousands of years of history, and you are
there, and they here. And that is what this particular motet
means for me. [applause]

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